Keeping Up With Lucy and Ethel at the Chocolate Factory – And in the Garden

Help! The conveyor belt keeps speeding up!

I would not have survived working in the chocolate factory with Lucy and Ethel.

I would have died, doubled over in laughter, as I do nearly every time I watch this clip.

Plus, I would have been right there with them stuffing my cheeks with chocolate candies. I mean, wouldn’t you? Seems like a swell place to hide them from the supervisor. Especially THAT supervisor, played so deliciously by comedic actress Elvia Allman who steals the screen from Lucy and Ethel when she fires off her command to speed up the conveyor belt.

The conveyor belt! That’s why I always wind up watching this silly episode of I Love Lucy about this time every spring. Because I feel like I can’t wrap the chocolates fast enough and that the conveyor belt is speeding up.

Just to be clear: I don’t have any trouble eating the chocolates. I am way far gone into a nightly chocolate addiction which has survived even the calorie reduction/weight loss situation I embarked on six months ago. Now I simply exist on vegetables, decaf coffee, and chocolate. Kidding. Sort of. Nutrition? Still working on that.

But that feeling that time is speeding up, tasks aren’t getting done properly, and that I need a 36-hour day? That’s a very special kind of spring anxiety, having everything to do with trying to get my vegetable and flower gardens ready while also doing my day job.

As anxieties go, this is hardly the worst, since I love every minute I spend on garden work – even the three hours I sat at my computer the other night reluctantly converting my hand-written records to Google Sheets.   

Most nights I am in the downstairs bathroom, where the shower is filled with plastic pots and trays and a big tub of potting soil. I fill the trays with soil, balance them on the sink or toilet, plant the seeds, write the labels (Zinnia Purple Prince, Snapdragon Chantilly Sherbet, Fairy Tale Eggplant, Jet Star Tomato), and move the trays to the heating pad in the TV room. By the end of the evening the bathroom is a wreck, with a fine layer of potting soil on every surface.

In the morning I check the trays on the heating pad to see if there’s been any germination. Once at least 50 percent of the cells in a tray have a sprout, I move the tray (or individual six packs) over to a double-decker rolling cart outfitted with shop lights. The cart holds several hundred seedlings, but it has already filled up and overflowed this year, meaning some of the bigger and older seedlings have had to go elsewhere to make room for the babies. And like the chocolates on the conveyor belt, there are always another 150 seedlings germinating on the heat mat about to come my way. YIKES!

In past years, I tried to limit the number of seedlings I started so that there’d be enough room under the lights for everyone. But inevitably some of the plants – and all of the potted up dahlia tubers – would wind up next to windows in the house. I’d have to flip them around constantly to keep them from growing sideways. 

But this year we have the new hoop house; the lucky seedlings get to graduate and attend hoop house university. (And of course, what do I do but use this as an excuse to plant more seedlings.) Turns out, though, that not all seedlings are ready to step up; some wind up back at the house for extra tutoring. So the comic routine of seedling round-robin continues. (Witness the path I’m wearing in the front lawn.)

The hoop house gets hot fast; you have to be vigilant about checking the temperature and ventilating; fortunately we opted for roll-up sides and the hand crank works like a charm.

But last week it was unseasonably warm, so no sooner had I moved a round of sweet peas down to the hoop house than I found myself walking the poor droopy things back up to the house to hang out on the deck in the shade. Sweet peas love cool weather. Who ever heard of 80 degrees on Martha’s Vineyard in April?

It's not just the seed starting that makes my head spin. Dealing with garden infrastructure is a guaranteed opportunity for hand-wringing.

I did something radical this week and took a day off from work to make some headway in the garden. I wanted to build the trellises for the sweet peas and sugar snap peas, and to untangle the pile of drip hoses in the garage and get them laid out properly in the beds. And maybe do a bit of tidying in my garage work area, moving all the terra cotta pots back outside.

This seemed like a reasonable goal for one day. So why did I find myself standing out in the garden midmorning, practically paralyzed? It was another loopy conundrum that made me feel like I was taking one of those Reader’s Digest IQ tests that my father used to give me when I was 10 years old. Apparently I was much smarter then.

I almost cried.

This is how tall the sugar snap vines normally grow.

I couldn’t figure out where to put the pea trellises where they wouldn’t eventually be throwing shade on another bed, where they could be accessed from both sides, where the hoses could run straight without crimping, where they weren’t taking up the space that something else should go in. (Normally the snap peas go against the back fence, but that bed is recovering from last year’s pea weevil larva infestation!) I had drawn the garden plan on paper earlier in the year, but it wasn’t making sense now. Every time I thought I had a solution I found another problem.

The confounding thing about our existing fenced garden is that it is a series of raised boxes, mostly square, one a particularly awkward L-shape. The squares are too cramped for laying down drip hoses, which like to go in straight lines, not to circle back on themselves like a snake in the warm sun. Believe me, when we build the bigger garden down in the field, all the beds will be long rows, all the same width and length, all going in the same direction.

I got more and more frustrated, feeling like I was wasting the gift I’d given myself of a day off work. Then I finally realized – duh! – that there was no perfect solution to my pea trellis location dilemma. The answer was not some higher form of math; it was compromise. I understood that I just had to make a decision – which is what life is all about anyway. Saying yes. Or no. But making the decision.

By the end of the afternoon, I had the trellises up and the hoses cobbled together and pinned awkwardly to make gradual turns as necessary.

I tidied up the garage and my workbench.

And set up the potting bench outside.

I even planted some radish seeds.

I took a breath and felt for a minute as if the conveyor belt had maybe slowed down just a notch. I ate some chocolate. I talked on the phone with an old friend. I checked on the sweet peas. I lingered in the hoop house in the cool of the early evening, admiring the new growth in my trays of lettuces and greens. I took a walk with my husband. We grilled hamburgers to eat with our roasted vegetables and Beetlebung Farm greens with lemon-tahini vinaigrette. I picked some hellebores and daffodils and pansies for the table. We lit the candles as we do every night and had a nice dinner.

And then I set myself up in the bathroom again to sow another round of cosmos seed and transplant the little snapdragons into 4-inch pots. Until my husband stopped in and suggested I might want to quit for the night as I would probably function better with more than five hours of sleep. He’s no fun! And I’m nuts.

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